If you’re tired of only getting catalogs and bills in your mailbox, ask your friends to mail their tweets. For a month, Giles Turnbull corresponded with 15 of his Twitter followers by mail. “Tweeting by post made me appreciate the online and the offline. Brevity is a good thing, but there’s no reason we should only be brief on Twitter,” Turnbull writes for The Morning News. Pair with: Our roundup of literary Twitter’s first tweets.
Snail Twitter
Lewisohn’s Beatles Biography Hits Another Snag
Leading Beatles historian Mark Lewisohn has been working on a three-volume biography of the Liverpool band for almost a decade. Tentatively titled The Beatles: The Complete Story, the first installment was due for a publication date this year. Unfortunately, Volume One, which tracks the group from the beginning through December 1962, has hit yet another delay, and fans likely won’t see it until 2013. As Lewisohn says, the accuracy takes time, and “the whole ethos of the project is ‘do the job properly’.” Lewisohn’s last work was the 2006 Complete Beatles Recording Sessions.
Challenging the Able-Bodied Gaze
“I hate the idea that you must write every day because I really can’t do that. Sometimes the aching bones in my body will not allow it.” Electric Literature interviews three writers—Keah Brown, Esmé Weijun Wang, and Jillian Weise—about disability, publishing, and accessibility. From our archives: Wang’s 2016 Year in Reading entry.
Why A New Madame Bovary?
Lydia Davis, whose new translation of Madame Bovary comes out September 23, blogs at The Paris Review Daily about why we need yet another translation of Flaubert.
Interview with an Innkeeper
Some holiday cheer: John Scalzi offers up an interview with history’s most famous innkeeper.
Books with Class
Season Three of Downton Abbey arrived on our shores last night, and if you’re interested in learning more about the show’s literary pedigree, our own Garth Risk Hallberg has you covered.